Archangel
by Mariani
Summary: Kenny has been visiting Eric's room every night for the past seven months to torment him in exchange for safety from other fallen angels. Cartman/Kenny, brief Cartman/Wendy. Slight AU. Rated M for some gore, rape, and murder.


**A/N**: Inspired by "The Kill", "Savior", and "A Beautiful Lie", all by 30 Seconds to Mars.

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><p>Cartman's POV<p>

"_Say it."_

_I do not. My methods are primal enough to pour horrid laughter into the darkness. Purling fingers idle along my navel's paralyzed muscle in preparation to spring an ambush that, while inevitable, will exploit tears. They had already been distributed in translucent mineral deposits down my face._

_The honey I know so well dries up into black soot. "Say it." The threat hardly wears a veil, and the lack of camaraderie thins the air, making it a mouthful of oxidized nails to down._

_Liquid pulsates under my lids, unsure. I swallow the coal situated over his vocal chords; it cuts as if a diamond. "Please," the slave I am trapped inside of whispers._

"_Please what?" No doubt through the veritable lagoon of darkness and obscure, a decadent smile awaits me._

_The proper dosage of heat mounts into my tired ducts, and serves as a catalyst to tear flow. With them, a voice trickles out: "Please die."_

_It's not the right answer, but satisfies the monster's hunger enough to resonate a pleased grumble between us. I cannot restrain my emotions when my belt is worked loose. Fear gushes freely with the venomous grace of mercury, molten and deadly._

_I must not scream._

As the day and ruthless sun die around me, I remember Wendy.

The samarium of the night is unusual for this time of year, summer's swamped equinox, which, even in better days, could never be sculpted from such a pristine platinum canvas. Its reflection hardly nuanced with the silver of my crucifix. I had been toying with it, properly adjusting it between the slats of my collarbone into the hollow bowl of my sternum to cool the heat of my throat. Litanies, laced between my memory's catacombs, called out to be preached, all of which I of course ignored. There would be no point in dispensing hymns beneath an impenetrable, toxic cloak where no god could ever find them. I had been waiting in a sinister thunderhead when, in the storm's calm, in the quiet midst of a sun-baked holocaust, for whatever reason, she crossed my mind and stayed. She was the juggernaut that had all but plowed into my life back when that was a suitable label to my existence, and not somebody I liked to remember, but Wendy's determination, even postmortem, was unshakeable.

I start with remembering how she died.

"_You're…" An unfamiliar appreciation glimmers across her corneas, throbbing. "You're serious?"_

_This makes me laugh. "Yes, ho, I'm dead-serious. I want you to fucking marry me."_

_She laughs, too. It's light, free timbre is intoxicating. "Well how can I say no with a proposal like that?"_

_Then she kisses me, and the ring hugs her fourth finger wonderfully when I slide it on._

We were only sixteen when I asked her to marry me. That ring cost me a good deal of cash, labor, and marketing my mother's best jewelry to the unfaithful, lowlife businessman floating around our house every Friday night. Wendy had been wearing it the night of her murder, when she was shit-faced drunk; not an uncommon condition for her to be in, especially in the last weeks of her life, and civilization as a whole. Sober, she was bitter and disobedient. Society would forever be synonymous with her foe, the heretic to her unspoken religion. Drunk, however, and she was positively silly. Her mannerisms budded not from virago ancestry, but from the infertile mind of the child hidden deep past the roots of her warm mahogany eyes. She was an amusing drunk, until the bottles dried up and that wholly hellish glint was restored to her aura. Then an all too familiar anger returned to perfectly uttered criticisms, which I mirrored in my own timbre under the impression of disguised love. Maybe I truly loved her; my own emotions had no discipline or logic to them. They ran rampant and swept me into their tumultuous current. What Wendy and I had was not love, but a shocking affair mothers warned their daughters of to no avail. Whether intoxicated or lucid, we'd exchange raillery, secrets, and arrays of stored beliefs either under or devoid of brandy's menace. Brandy was the popinjay's brew that she preferred, not I, but, for her, I'd tolerate a rope and tree branch. By her own law, she was not "low down" enough to resort to beer-drinking. Those dined enough to do so were met with a pert toss of her coiffed head or indignant sniff from her ski-slope nose. She preferred to sip champagne out of posh crystal flutes, crossing her petite ankles beneath the hem of her silk eveningwear and trilling light-hearted coquetry more addictive than E & J, until the alcohol gave birth to an ugly, virile metamorphosis.

It was a dalliance I would unconditionally regret up until the night she passed. Drunk as she had been, I learned that it was not brandy or champagne or chardonnay that was mixed into her system. It was straight tequila that had probably been spiked with a whole manner of things. The ring of my phone carried with it a slurred message that my fiancé had consumed a shot too many to drag her drunk ass home. In the state I had been in that late April night – sick of her tracing the latest vogue as ardently as a treasure-hunter, like rainbows would rise from the chasms of vacant bank accounts and lead way to the real gold, and sick of the tears produced from passions no more restrained than my own, and sick of the façade-booze cocktails, and sick of _being_ sick – her simple, tittered message plunked down from the muzzle of an open storm drain and fed my ears pollutants. I had driven to the club shrunken into an angry carapace, which provided shelter to my ire. Fueled by grumblings, I was ready to shred our engagement to bite-size bits for the rats scurrying under our feet…or at least threaten to. How I'd readied for a one-sided brawl when I rolled into a barren parking lot to see her lurching through a maze of pyrite puddles cast down from streetlights. I had my attire, script, and spotlight. Stepping out, cold rolled off of my watertight seal. A light breeze hitched under my hair and breathed against my scalp, my ambivalence felt right down to my marrow. If not for the simmering blood broth broiling inside of me, though, I would have noticed her own blood oozing out from the gash torn below my breasts onto her netted hands. I would have noticed that was moving not with a drunkard's stumble, but with the wounded lope of Athena from battle. At that moment, though, despite being sobered, she could carry the no burden of any god. True, the alcohol had been purged from her bloodstream, but so had the _blood_ itself, leaving her _streams_ only those of pained tears and her veins gripping nothing but dry air and the bleak knowledge of death.

I noticed none of this until I noticed him. Until she crumpled like a pile of discarded laundry and his trance-casting eyes found me, coring straight through mine and robbing me of any scream I had then, or would ever have again. His eyes were the red of a dragon in its nightmarish lair, the red he had swiped from my only love's varicose pipes and blotted into her shirt's fibers, red enough to destroy my sanity once and for all through his masque of sweet dreams. I was positive that I had once known him, many a time ago when the moon was waxed out to the full and the stars had enough spangle to distinguish their shapes and a metallic aroma wasn't scraping against my nostrils. Not then. I knew absolutely nothing then, clotted by his saccharine smile and sweet tooth glistening in a brass-lit candy land.

My shoulder would bruise later from where he touched me.

_Speech abandons me, shivering in the hollow of one of my ribs._

_Before his stitched grin, a horrible black hook unfurls to urge me to be quiet. Unbidden, he casts other phantom hooks into me and puncture the edges of my heart, where screams echo in every chamber._

"_Quiet," a dripping, oily voice teases, one I fooled myself into believing that I actually knew. "That's a good boy, Eric. Good."_

_He is touching me. His hand is on my shoulder, claws clicking invisible piano keys and sending the chords' reverbs along my collarbone to my pounding pulse._

"_You stay there now. Enjoy the show." Callous laughter longs to break free underneath his taunting tone. He wants a retaliation he will never get, a retaliation as mythical as the monster he's become. "But stay quiet. Okay, Eric?"_

"_No," I whisper, somewhere far away. The word latches onto the bile-slicked walls of my esophagus and won't let go. It never makes it out, and I am rendered a standing comatose, a presence not entirely human loitering on my shoulder, in my ears, right in front of me. Long coils descend past her tapered shoulders, resembling slumbering mambas that are jet black as her parched soul. Budding crimson blooms droop beneath her cotton blouse, dribbling onto the pavement. I watch them for as long as I can, until they only exist within the corrosive walls of Kenny's stomach._

The entire time he was devouring Wendy, I didn't cry. I didn't cry either when he reared back, her life pooling at his jaws and then on my quivering cheek where he kissed me goodbye. I didn't shed a single tear. I suppose now that that made me almost as heartless and cruel as he, because I knew beneath Wendy's groomed, hard-hitting exterior lay the obvious ghost of her childhood, one shut up by stone-cold fear. Outside, she might have been a quick and alluring whirlwind – ironically, her extravagant life lasted about as long as one, too – but inside, at the pit of that peach, was the remains of a long-broken soul, a child who chased after red balloons, lost dreams, and soaring kites, all to no avail. Just another thing I didn't notice, though I realize that my tear count has certainly amplified in the past five months.

I was a child with her once, too. But still then, I would not cry for my own misled life. Crying was left for the babies who didn't realize what a nuisance tears really posed. And the children and adults who cried were just pussies, douchebags, and queers asking to get their sobbing faces pounded. That task was left to me and assholes like me. Back then, though, I'd rather have been an asshole than a fag with "feelings." Maybe now I am, for heaving so much that my storages now resemble riverbeds ravaged by droughts.

However, to say that I have no reason to cry in these demented demon's days would be the biggest lie I've ever told.

_In front of us, the chlorine green ocean tosses up a white-crested wave against the decomposing wooden pier, retreating as quickly as it came. "Hey, Eric?" he says beside me._

"_Yeah?" Heavenward heat bakes the tips of my ears and nose as I pivot toward him._

_He angles his face so a tress gold as unbroken sand lands over his wide right eye. "We're best friends forever…right?"_

"_Of course, dude." I grin, and his effulgent return catches the sun, reflecting in the glittering cradle of water below._

Outside, a swoop startles the unusually still night, the beat of a predator's wings against updrafts of toxic air so consumed by smoke and death that, at times, it seems to be gasping for a breath of its own. He's here.

My right hand curls around the hilt of the cleaver I don't have, but so desperately need. I hold absolutely still on the edge of my bedspread as shadows creep onto the burnt, crumpling wall by the stifled moonlight. The silhouettes of demons dance gleefully across the exposed wood, manifesting eventually into one gnarled hand. It extends over bare piping and splits in the oak toward the only shadow it has ever desired. Frost falls onto my arms in thick strips, which have been reduced to trembling gooseflesh from the hallucination. I know that the sudden provocation of irrational fear is a pointless circulation of adrenaline from an angel's attempt at a sick joke, but I have no control over the pound of my heart. Sweat ripens underneath the hand's oily, ice-cold hold on my neck. Its fingers play with the crucifix clasp before wilting away like deceased cobras. I'm allowed to respire again.

It's no relief, though, for a new darkness has taken form upon the wall, this one in the shape of a crouching jungle cat. Only, it's all too real, the unthinkable terror the hand had been warning of. I remain marble-still, my chewed fingernails nearly bloodying my palms in the cusp of each fist. A vein of perspiration cuts down my face in spite of the unearthly chill that has settled over the room, while a new phantom hand clamps around my windpipe. This is entirely a product of my imagination, but at twice the potency as before.

The last thing I said to Wendy was, "Goddamnit, fine. See ya there." Utter affronted sigh. Slam receiver down.

Jump-start the trauma.

It's chilling what seven months can bring over you, how far down time can travel to spur the foibles stored nearest to your soul.

"_N-no…"_

_He leans into the column of light, pale and lethal as a bloodroot. "Shh, don't be scared."_

Perched just beyond the flimsy screen of the wide-open window is a well-acquainted entity. I offer no greeting. His tranquil, hatred-red eyes gaze into the room, burning the me who is still struggling to shake off ash. I've memorized every aspect that has become of my Kenny, his paralyzing presence mapped clearly in scar tissue through the troubled glades of my mind. The labyrinthine design cuffed up his right forearm indicates an archangel, he's said, one of the first guardians banished to Hell. He is a particularly beautiful angel, I'll admit, donning a crown of immaculate waves that retain a vibrant saffron tone fully illuminated in the muted glow of the moon. His skin is no darker than ivory, and just as carved from head-to-bare-toe. The pop of ruby orbs against his alluring face has a stunning outward affect, as does the velvet fringe of eyelashes that could almost pass him as innocent, if not for the harsh tintinnabulation his sharp irises grates against the sharpening stones of his pupils. They propel with torpedo precision through a fifteen foot wall of air and breach holes in my haul. Nothing leaks, for there is nothing beyond the battered walls.

He has landed on a fir tree branch that hangs in front of the window; it's the very limb that no doubt submitted to the voodoo of being a profiled hand. To him, it was emphasis for his arrival, a prank in his world. To me, however, it was blatantly petrifying.

Despite the weight he carries, though, the fragile branch barely dips in acknowledgment of its breathtaking occupant, as if he is no more than a distant constellation gracing the treetops from afar. If that was true, then perhaps the galaxy's coal black incarceration would serve as a padlock to keep him away from me. I don't bother manifesting up a fruitless prayer, though. I remain while he sits forward on his haunches, with his toes curled over the soft bark, and the slope of his back turned toward the endless sky. Between the chiseled plates of his shoulder blades sprout two patches for wings, which spill out fully behind him in feathered strokes of ink against the pale night. Abruptly, both wings fold shut like black silk fans, so that Kenny is permitted more leeway to move closer to the screen. I know what comes next in this tale. Still, the regrettably proverbial sound of his pinions clapping together manages to draw a wince from me. It tugs at pinwheels of scarring tucked underneath my jaw. I hear bombshells detonating beneath my traumatized trances.

My mother's gaunt face invades my mind, drilling like an ice-pick. For a moment, her protruding cheekbones, her billows of limp, unctuous hair, the piebald patterns over the worn tendons of her hands, and the warble of her voice are clear. Then, I submerge her back into the black waters of my conscious' quagmire, not unlike the evening air she was escorted, screaming and thrashing, into the day the angels found her.

I hate them so much, the thing – in the guise of my Kenny – stooped outside my window included.

His hand abruptly disengages from the branch and uncurls five slender digits peaked by deadly curves of fingernails that nearly blend into the dark. They flex back into an arc and hook into the screen's netting. Raised vertical scars contract with his bloodless lips – evidence of the thread that had long ago sealed the screams away when his heaven-righted wings were stripped off – as they spread into a lurid grin. Kenny rakes his claws through mesh that kicks up a discordant sympathy in the wake of its tearing. Each twang of snapping string leaves a stinging backlash on the bruised surface of my cheek. Now I am no longer sucking air into the worn cavities of my lungs, but a thick, impending doom that pollutes the air. What I bring on the exhale is raw fear. But I fasten a fist around my rosary beads anyway, winding them until blood cannot comfort my deadening muscle. The tight, sacerdotal coil inspires heat to trickle back into my forearm and momentarily feed an ember of hope I'm clinging to, that everything will be okay.

_I tremble, unspeaking, with the strong acrimony of debauchment lodged in my windpipe, practically shoved down there. The monster speaks again: "It's okay, Eric. They won't find you."_

"_Kenny…" My chords threaten to give out under the strain of his name._

"_Shh…don't cry." Slender arms pull me against a hoarfrost organism that is the epitome of Hell. "I'm here now."_

"_Why are you doing this to me?"_

The talons touch down with hollow taps onto the filthy windshield, and, realizing their work is complete, latch onto the screen. Another set joining them, a slit is discovered and unzipped to a gaseous, contaminated ocean. Currents thick with loss cascade through the stoma of the screen, followed swiftly by the messiah capable of parting the inconsumable sea. His descent across a foot of air is as soundless as his ascent from the magma of Hell; his glossy black feathers fit nicely through the gap. They rise up in a stockpile of swords, each felt individually in my skin. With him, Kenny brings a sulfurous odor of stolen souls and new world order, as well as an untimely winter's frost that reaches down my throat and seizes my heart. With luck, it'll kill me. Without, it'll associate pleasure with the suffering I'm about to undergo. That sacrilege I prefer in the winged creature that has entered my room.

A steel rod sets my spine perfectly level; the sheets below bond to the fibers of my jeans so that I cannot move. I don't remember what logic was distorted by my brain when I decided to put them on. The holiest water would fall over him like rain, and earn no sounds except ragged laughter. Only three short strides separate me from my death, one so unworldly that it's borderline incomprehensible. Past the shredded screen is a moon that rules at the summit of the midnight sky. Its pale, sallow spotlight falls across sculpts of muscle and their impeccable topcoat, Lucifer's best handiwork to date. For a moment, my fear forms a gateway to another illusion that paints a gloss of evil over the seemingly unadulterated sylph standing way too close for comfort. For several fleeting seconds, my visualization responds with horror that contorts my tongue in a long-overdue desire to cry out.

Then, it's gone, and the magnesia-pale angel blinks to prove his existence.

His eyes fall into a natural shadow from the caramel kissing his eyelashes. Even so, I will not face them. I quickly stare at the opaque curtains that cling desperately onto the discolored iron rod above. Countless spots, burns from spent cigarettes, litter the silk like the plague. Silence buzzes in my ears, a pesky insect that will do more than draw blood. The falsities rolling across the diluted flatland of my mind grow fat in the angel's presence, gaining speed and ferocity from shallow pinpricks of memory's needle to heavy saturations that knit themselves from yarn. The added weight creates a pressure on my ducts that clouds my periphery. I gulp down my desire, choking on it midway through, although it's a wasted effort. Rain soon forms from the patchy overcast.

Outside, a gale rips at the screen before passing to safer grounds. The wind spatters against my skin like liquid fire. If it's meant to lead me into a scream, I can't do it. Ice instantly reclaims the scorched area, the slush running off and drowning me right there in a watery grave. Kenny aims another homicidal grin at me, possibly aware of the arias battling for dominance in my head. His snarling maw bristles with dozens of bloody, crocodilian teeth, a sadist's smile that does not suit him, but does not spoil his beauty, either. I pretend that I cannot feel those venom-tipped fangs plunging headlong into my flesh, an event that looms in the future's fog. I remember our youth when he'd visit my room to lounge around and puff smoke rings from hand-rolled joints, or coerce me into indulging on the Internet's dark sex underworld, or meddle where my somewhat legal businesses did not concern him, or just do a whole manner of activities to piss me off. Occasionally, he would simply stretch as a sunbathing cat would on the duvet as the frayed hem of his thread-thick jacket – rarely did he wear a shirt, shoes, or underwear – would knowingly and oh so wantonly up the strip of his concave, cigarette-burnt middle until it drove me mad. This always made him laugh in that delightfully shrill way of his, before he'd recline with either a pack of my Marlboros or pinched Don Julio, or nothing but a sheet to catch up on long-lost Z's in result to a broken home. And, when the evening's curtains drew to a close around the sun and Mother chirped my name softly through the door, Ken would flutter to his undressed feet and slip out into the merlot-colored twilight with an effortless scale to the lawn below. His only pause would be to spin around and blow a kiss, batting his lashes here and there, mid-stride.

"_Ken, time for dinner." _

_Eyelids still fallen over his tired eyes, Kenny murmurs, "Do I _have_ to?" He stresses it childishly, even recovering from bleary fatigue._

"_Yes, you do" I groan. "Now haul ass." Something I cannot identify with catches from seeing him this sprawled and vulnerable._

_Hands raise into the sky, resembling white flags in more ways than one. "Carry me?" he says meekly. His sapphires have managed to open to plead with me, lower lip pulsing like a pincushion. There's no need, though. I'm still trapped in a nautical blue crossfire._

_The lighting does wonders for his irises. As faggy as it feels to allow such a thought, it really does._

_I kneel and his arms clasp around my neck like the necklaces we share to symbolize sure affiliation. His willowy legs sling as the belt around my waist when I lift him, lighter than the air I can't seem to breathe. For a moment, our heartbeats thud with only cotton and tight bone corsets between them._

_Then: "Fairy."_

_It caresses my neck and ignites a different spark at the pit of my belly. He snickers in my ear. I huff irately, settling him in my arms. "Goddamnit, Kinny…"_

I can only long for those carefree days and that blithe Kenny again, the zenith of otherwise what can only be described as a spectacular tedium. Then, I was free to be vindictive and he was free to be aloof, both to our life itself. Then, Kenny, like Wendy, was a person I may have loved, but he's destroyed that risk and blown it down calamity's path. And he certainly does not, and never did, love me. Whatever this fling of ours is, it's not love. As such, I firmly keep my gaze affixed to a prune-colored burn on the fabric, like it will prove a moot point, until Kenny's focus recoils into the husks of his garnet eyes. I have been well numbed in the cold grip of tension, but my ears still operate enough to bring my inner dread to a boil. Kenny is crossing the floor in front of the bed we once shared when his parents' bottles emptied and their tempers flared full of flame; his weightless feet force frustrated groans from the floorboards. They crack bitterly into an icy wall of quiet, which has all but aroused disquiet from my troubled thoughts. Gunshots and their exhausted bullet shells accentuate his journey. Briefly, it occurs to me that the doctors of the distant, logical world would say that sufferers from trauma perceived sounds much more amplified, like the "shell" in their shell-shock had carved echo chambers in their skulls.

And even though they've never crossed a being the likes of which I have for far too long, I am inclined to believe them.

Kenny's ridged mouth never leaves its smirking stance, while his pupils continually flit toward their prey from the corner of their sockets. Each neon flash of crimson attracts the fine hairs at the nape of my clammy neck, supplying the proof that I have not gone a minute of this unwatched. I choke down a shard of fear and loosen my vision from the tattered curtain. The first thing I catch sight of is the screen; bathed in a sickly light, each torn link is unrolling, seemingly by witchcraft, and reuniting with its brother. Such a simple act of black magic instigates a tide of repulsion in my gut. Every night the screen – along with my dissolving sanity – was shredded, but the similarities end there because, while the mesh was stitched back together under an invisible seamstress' practiced hand, my mind continues to lay dismembered, ignored, dampened by deflowered tears, and in dire need of repair. However, the abused orphan that is my very conscious only subjects to more torment, and learns further and further how to crawl away and hide. I suffered the greatest in moments of constricted suspense, such as now. I force my eyes in the direction that Kenny has taken; my peripherals give no insight to his whereabouts, only the amber prism of light filtering through the healing screen. But the punctuation of creaking mahogany indicates that Kenny is approaching my dresser, an object purchased by my mother that suggests happier, easier days. A hunk of cheap cherry wood and stainless steel knobs, the once middle-class furnishing is now posh in humanity's broken aura. I rotate toward it in a panic. Old box springs grunt, like the monster remains under my bed instead of standing across a blanket-and-stained-sheet moat.

Seated on the scuffed dresser in their own pools of dim light are two candles I lit earlier, for reasons unbeknownst to me. Petals of fire that have bloomed from glimmering wax puddles seem to flinch at the sudden drop of temperature and oxygen-rich life. They are spread apart at opposite corners of the peeling expanse, as though serving burial rites to a faithless god. A nasty chuckle is elicited and one candle, its flame trembling – not unlike me – is lifted from the safety of solid ground. The glass does a pirouette before calculating eyes in which cruelty older than time itself can be seen by the orange illumination. In between two black clamps, the sapphire heart of the flame shudders around its wick. Kenny spins it to him and blows out a stream from his mouth's peach blossom pucker. The breath has the chill of peppermint and aroma of nectar. Smoke curdles in the air above like malignant parasites under magnification. Somehow, although only aimed at a small, quivering target, the effect is distributed to the entire room. An icicle skewers my tightening stomach and more Braille raises on my forearm, thoughts only readable to someone blessed by blindness.

I can't even determine what my body wants to shove against walls and yowl until voices become arid, crackling kindle. If only I was blind. It would serve me so, so well.

Candles extinguished and streaming unheard sobs to the ceiling, Kenny's agonizingly slow amble back into his favorite victim's line of sight falls on deaf ears. So begins the preparation. Often, I find it easier to endure my punishment by mounting the tarnished steps of my mind's cathedral and cowering beside the abandoned altar. It's the second best to blind. But my efforts to isolate the sear Hell's fire on my skin, I know, are forever futile. No matter how dark of a corner my reverie was buried, Kenny assured that reality eclipsed every attempt at escape, that the pain was as corrosive to my fragile state of mind as the acid in my clenched stomach was to my swallowed screams. Unlike me, his unclean desires can still be satisfied. And he no doubt wants me bleached pale by fear and agony, which is always fulfilled at a slave driver's corrupted expertise. Still, I will try. No prices are paid by those who try.

_There's a hand, hot and damp with all seven sins. A hand is in my hair, cutting down my temple past crystalline comets of dried tears. It is attached to the voice responsible for this war's maelstrom. It says, "You know what I wish?"_

_I will time to dash by._

"_I wish…this could be…forever…"_

"_What are you doing?" I croak, garroted by a silent force._

_He smiles against my ribs, which heave unsteadily against his tousled head. A tongue darts out from his crosshatched mouth and takes some tangible, perspiring panic with it. "Just doing some tests." A contrived frown creases its creamy expression. Red-hot embers pin me to the bed. "Oh no, I lost my place. Guess I'll have to start over again…"_

_I feel the spindle planting tracks of goose bumps for footprints up, up, up, like the silent legs of a black widow that will deluge my veins with its excruciating venom. _

Back in better times, children were warned of the monsters, vampires, and unsightly beasts lurking in the shade beneath their beds. However, I cannot recall if I was ever told what would happen when the monster tired of hiding. Kenny is my nightmare, both in his nocturnal and malevolent nature, that decided to come out and play, a virus that has violated me again and again, and grown into an amorphous malady that will one day cripple me. Perhaps that day has already come and gone. Of all the things to question, I am absolutely sure that I will never be rid of my unwanted visitor; no curse exists in this hopeless world. But it was in those better times when I was still a child alongside my fiancé (then just "my bro's bitch"), when we were all still children, that I had a best friend named Kenny, who, as far as our local legends flew, couldn't die. Until he did, and festered into an unthinkable, winged _something_.

And it's not nice when children die.

Whatever murdered dear Wendy and ingrained my Kenny with the image of Death's exquisite scythe, and is now leering over me, is a demon not meant to be depicted properly by the mere human tongue. I have the rigid posture of a prisoner behind his cell bars, while Kenny possesses a ready poise identical to that of a bullet in a barrel – quick, willing, and deadly. His knees suddenly plummet to the floor and bring him into my line of sight. I forget how to breathe. Not that it would matter; my insiders have been deprived of nourishment for far too long, and are black masses sagging around my weakened skeleton. He grows a mouthful of crimson-crowned daggers aligned in rows when he jeers, "Did you miss me?"

The question sounds fresh and new from his throat, even though I know it's not. My silent surrender is a three-month-old occurrence, but evokes that rogue smile to creep onto Kenny's scarred lips. His hell-raised pupils are deep wells rimmed by the blood of his last victim, with their black death glistening at the bottom. They are not something one would miss. I miss so many other things: Wendy, once my bro's bitch, now my late fiancé, along with her foppish, borderline-mad, method of approach and attack; Kenny, once my best friend, now a sin with a name, and his sunlit eyelashes, his lucid eyes that reminded me of limpid ocean waters instead of subterranean Hell; the pussy douchebag freaks at school who were dense enough to cater to me; when I could still awake from dreams, not nightmares, juvenile dreams of nonsense and girls, or sometimes a boy with uncombed flaxen hair and haunting crystal blue eyes that hid behind mine for much longer than I would have preferred. These days, though, I think I could situate well with an ice blue than be alone with a red like fire's pulsing heart.

_Half a heart hangs from a chain around his neck, coming to rest above one that is full, beating, and strong. I wonder for a blink who lives in his heart, if it's me or a skank adorned in short skirts, tattoos of the woman-hater she calls "Daddy", and all kinds of goodies that hungry sugar addicts can find between her bruised thighs and go positively diabetic from. Or maybe not at all. Maybe –_

_He looks up. Polished turquoise collides right into me and I could topple backwards. But I don't. Because now he's moving toward me and I remember that I'm human, and I'm okay, I'm okay…_

Oh yes. There are many things I miss. It begins slowly, always slowly, because a sprint would mean more missing, missing of more things I would gladly, whole-heartedly go on without…although, the questions that remain are if my heart is still whole – in healthier days, half was devoted to his svelte neck, and now, I'm convinced he has enslaved nearly all of it – and if going on is still doable. Questions. I take them and drape them between us. There are agonizing, shallow cavities rotted into my skull, where I clamber to flee from the treacherous, pounding tide. Any minute now, the attack will begin and I will beg him to stop because it's the only thing keeping me alive.

That's not what I feel, though. What I feel now is nothing less than pain. A straight, hard lance of pain. His mouth moves around threads of trust, of love and salvation that was already damned, while his hands sew them in the merciless color of midnight into my memory. "I love you so much Eric, you know I love you, you're so brave, so beautiful." Requiems burn every nerve that still has the will to function and therefore torture me. He is touching me now, and there is no amount of humming will drown his own solo. It's his stage. I'm his puppet. So I lay there, dying with every new stroke of my strings, and squeeze my eyes painfully shut, still holding onto the truism that out of my distraught sight means out of my delirious mind. Metal scalds on my hips, and the room is unbearably cold to the rest of me. Muscles jerk and quiver around conclaves of bruises, scars, and discolorations. I whimper without even realizing it. The rosary beads and crucifix coalesce, strangling me in their makeshift noose.

Queen of martyrs, hear me, and know me.

Am I a martyr? Have I suffered for the innocent, protected the weak?

Hooks sink into skin somewhere I have lost the ability to pinpoint on my body. Suddenly, the heat breeds into a sickly wetness. Corneas burning with no tears to soothe them, I look down. His head is at the forbidden place below my abdomen, hands anchored on either leg, with my jeans lying in an indigo tangle at the bed's foot. It's the kind of sin that, six months ago maybe, I would pass off with harsh words that didn't belong to me or violence that wasn't the true reflection of me soul. Today, I have no voice or soul to speak of, so I can only fit around the shape of a silent scream. Pleasure doesn't translate, only the desecrated feeling I know too well. He frees his own mouth briefly to release a lusty moan, lulled by the catnip affect blood has on him. Its coppery tinge wafts up, malodorously suspended over us. Then he returns, his talons rising like rings against the quivering paleness of my thighs. I jolt, shuddering, and printing an image of the cross into my waxy hand. His hungry lips work me as easily as I've made it for him, with the occasional pass at the wounds on either side of my crotch's ravine. Saliva that is not at all human pools on the canyon walls, around my arousal so-to-say, individual amylase swamps that glisten almost at the equal sheen of exposed tissue. They beg to be satisfied, winking like the spangled eyes of a succubus from the backlight of the stars filtering in. I secure my own shut.

"_You don't understand," I snap, nearer to yelling. Antigens clamor under my skin, agreeing to which intruders they will kill. "He can't die!"_

_The doctor who was supposed to listen to me and mend my problems is a tall man, sun-bleached in his eyes and hair, the color of baked adobe in the wrinkles stretched around. A recently exhausted syringe – "remedies" for my very unhappy innards – is brandished like a weapon in his right hand. The deep tan settled over his fingers reminds me of Kenny, which makes me want to vomit up the tar that he unknowingly plastered under my ribs. But if I tell anybody about that, then I'll have to tell them about Wendy, and how she died, which is territory that not even Jesus will tread._

_Kenny has been officially dead for eight weeks, Wendy for three. Whoever is with me under my skin isn't Kenny, but the outcome of evil's only witness._

_The tears prickle like thorns. "You believe me…right?" I keep the angered lilt in my voice, because it's all I truly know now._

_He inhales. Blows it out. The breath reeks of astringent Listerine. "Do you want to talk to somebody about it, Eric?"_

_And that was when the gnawing secrets finally locked my voice up._

_I would not find it again until two weeks after, when the world ended and the Apocalypse began. That was eighteen hours before Kenny first showed up at my window. _

Mirror of justice, forgive me.

There is no justice. I did not know what justice was when it was still an embodiment, not an outlying galaxy terrified of shining upon the devil-run Earth. How can I be saved, when there is no righteousness, only self-sacrifice? But there are more questions. I take them and build, craft and construct blockades. He continues, oblivious to my paltry defenses. I am shrinking, collapsing within myself and finding places to hide. I've been broken, for sure. The sharp wreckage pierces knots in my gut. God help me.

God cannot help me. Only his iniquitous counterpart can.

It feels like searing charcoals deposited below when Kenny's dastardly work is finished, and I bite my own tongue instead of the screech that roars out. He knows it's a cry of dissent, of abuse, of the deepest cut violation can give, but doesn't care, only shifts into another predatory leer. I hate it. I hate myself. I hate everything there is left to hate. Licking his lips in a deliberately slow, coital manner, he straddles me and watches similar to an angel in Heaven rather than Hell as the dam is defeated. The force of the torrent rips loose something else that has been crusted against the tunnels. I know what must be done long before hot and heavy saltwater currents glide down to the mattress. Wendy and I were virgins when we first went to bed together some lost time ago. That seems leagues below an impenetrable sea now, ethereal, intangible, and utterly impossible. I am no virgin, Kenny is no angel, and this thing is no Kenny. This is not love, this is not me, and this is not a life. If God will not rescue me, then I see no alternative fight, if I see anything at all past the tears' murk. So, hands finding loose groundings at the crests of Kenny's elegant shoulders, I pull up and choke out my final request between teeth grit with caged frustration, the only possible ending for our treacherous plot. At first, horror drops the crater in my middle to my feet, then, the ancient words rolled off my tongue, wholly hellish in only two utterances of vile sound.

"T-t-t-take me."

Understanding overtakes the hostile light of his pupils, then the peaking crescent-moon grin.

"_You know," he purrs, "I can save you. All you have to do…is say…'take me.' And we'll be together always."_

_Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death._

"_Would you like that, Eric?" He's inches from my face, so close with murderous eyes and piranha's incisors that the atmosphere dividing us freezes, quavering. "Just say the words, and I will. I will take you and we can be together forever."_

_Blessed Virgin, have mercy. Cleanse my spirit, and bless my friend. He knows not what he does._

_My silence is determined encouraging, which slices those faded lines up. It's so awful that I cannot bear to look. His speech leaves a rancorous malice fizzing in my mouth: "Or maybe…we'll always be together, no matter what. Yes…that would be…so nice…"_

_He splits my sealed lips into a dark kiss._

_Save me. Save us both. _

I do not remember how, but suddenly, we are standing on the brink of a chasm; I recognize that it's my roof, and that the cataclysm laying to the horizon's edge was once my hometown, but it doesn't matter. As Kenny braces the cold black sea of poison and distant, twinkling stars of happier civilizations, I grip his hand. My eyes are forced shut by the toxic air as we plunged down, down, down toward the slit throat of Hell. I feel Kenny's dead flesh as the glove to my own hand until I can feel it no more. I feel the screams rushing past me, and the rosary beads' strenuous grip when they point toward their skyward home and break free, much more befitting in Heaven than Hell. God is waiting for them, as The Despoiler is waiting for me. And, for the first time, I am ready.

Neck free, I finally plummet with Kenny to a night where the moon is not king, and where no star will ever shine.


End file.
